History

  • It is hard to fathom what this man must have felt doing the sport he loved, whilst he was imprisoned in Auschwitz.Every match he boxed was literally a match to the death for either him or his opponent. Salamo Arouch (January 1, 1923 – April 26, 2009) was a Jewish Greek boxer, the Middleweight Champion…

    Read more →

  • This is something that always intrigued me. How many serial killers were there during WWII and got away with it because they joined the various death squads? Where they could kill authorized by the Nazi regime, and indeed the regimes of the other axis nations. And what differentiated those who were captured and brought to…

    Read more →

  • Turn Back Time

    If I could turn back time, would I bring my lost loved ones back to life?Or would I, in doing so, only return them to more pain and suffering? If I could turn back time, would I revisit the place where I first met my wife?Would she still be there, smiling the same way?How different…

    Read more →

  • David Friedmann’s story is not just a story of dealing with the horrors of the Holocaust but also a story of a second chance and hopes despite immense grief and hardships. The artist David Friedmann was born in Mährisch Ostrau, Austria (now Ostrava, Czech Republic), but moved to Berlin in 1911. In 1944, Friedman was…

    Read more →

  • After the liberation of Germany in May 1945 the Allied Powers initiated a comprehensive denazification program. Its purpose was to eradicate National Socialist thought from political, economic as well as intellectual and cultural life. As a first step the NSDAP and its subdivisions were prohibited, Nazi laws were abolished and the external signs and symbols…

    Read more →

  • The forgotten WWII massacre

    Although this blog is about a massacre which killed 750,000 victims within a week, not everyone reading this will be shocked about it. At the beginning of World War II, a government pamphlet led to a massive cull of British pets. As many as 750,000 British pets were killed in just one week. In 1939…

    Read more →

  • The Holocaust is often best described in the simplicity of the art and words of the child victims. Below are some poems and drawings from children of the Holocaust. The painting above was by a child interred in the Terezin Camp during the Holocaust. She dreamed of seeing butterflies again. At TerezínWhen a new child…

    Read more →

  • A question people often ask me is “Why did so many Germans believe Hitler and the NSDAP?” Hitler did not keep his hate for Jews and other groups he deemed unworthy a secret. In fact he wrote about it in Mein Kampf and other political publications.So why did so many Germans endorse him and his…

    Read more →

  • Anyone who loves westerns or has an interest of the history of the so called Wild West, will undoubtedly have heard of “the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral”. The infamous event that took place in Tombstone, Arizona on October 26,1881. If you believe the Hollywood versions of the event, you’d think that the gunfight lasted…

    Read more →

  • The title is taken from a  letter written by Marcel Nadjari ,a Jewish-Greek survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau. Marcel  was a member of the Sonderkommando in Birkenau from May 1944 to November 1944. The letter is an eye witness account of his experiences as a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz Birkenau. He had the task of of removing…

    Read more →